Public Signals Checklists
[0:21] Intro
[0:45] New Video Series Coming!
[2:10] T-Shaped Marketing
[4:12] Our 28-point Checklist
[4:40] Conversion Optimization
[18:30] Traffic Generation
[29:15] The Wrap Up
Brian: Alright, welcome to Matchcast.
This is kind of a special episode because we are going to be introducing a new topic and a new, probably monthly or at least very often, new sort of media that we are going to be producing, and it’s actually going to be a video feed going through some of the different things that we look at when we first start working with a client or working with a potential client.
We are doing a podcast today to launch that series, so Chris can you kind of lead us in to what we’re going to look at?
CHRIS: Yeah for sure, this podcast is a little bit of an exercise for ourselves to think through the details and kind of put it out there and see if people have any feedback on what we’re thinking of doing. But essentially it’s a very practical and tactical analysis of the bits and pieces of digital marketing that are sitting out there when somebody contacts us about potentially working for them or something comes across our inbox that a company that we’re interested in digging into more.
We immediately do all these things where we look at source code, and see what kind of title tags they have on their press, or tracking tags that they might have for marketing purposes and a bunch of different tools that digital marketers will be familiar with, like Spy-Fu and others where we can find out how they’re doing on SEO what they’re spending on PPC.
And we kind of have this approach where we really all dive into it really quickly and within 5 or ten minutes we are looking at each other like, ok they’ve got a great video, they seem like their Facebook page is pretty stale, x,y,z, whatever the insights are that we come up with. And we thought it might be interesting to take that apart and be a little more systematic about it and share that with others.
Brian: And it really gives us a lot of insight into their marketing program, what they’re doing now, what might be working for them, what might not be working for them, and just the overall strategic setup for digital marketing as things really hopefully kick off for that client.
CHRIS: Yeah and on that strategy point something we’ll touch on in this podcast and hopefully on the show that we do, is digital marketing in its nature, is in order to be found publicly. So there’s a lot of things you can learn about a company’s marketing just by doing these sorts of research that we’re talking about.
And there’s a lot of discussion out there in our industry about going really broad or specializing, do you want to just be the person who does PPC,
BRIAN: Just Facebook or just analytics?
CHRIS: Just analytics, just video, just mobile, just conversion rate optimization, just landing pages. There’s so many different things that a lot of agencies do really well, and specialize in. We made a choice to be broader and certainly there’s areas that we’re more expert in than others, or we think are more impactful than others. But it really brings to mind this concept that I think came from Rand Fishkin from Moz first introduced widely. Which is the T-shaped skills, T-shaped marketer, T-shaped Marketing firm. And what it is, is basically across the top, you want to be broad, meaning you should know enough about all the different areas of digital marketing. You should know enough about SEP. you should know enough about PPC; you should know enough about analytics. And then you should be able to go deep in one or two or three of these areas.
And so we have our own kind of developing thoughts about it, some of it comes down to well we’re particularly interested in, individually it can come down to our experience. It can come down to hopefully, what a particular client needs. And really what’s impactful in the moment, so we’re an agency that tries to be out more on the edge of things that are new.
BRIAN: Like Facebook Live
CHRIS: Like Facebook live, like Facebook video.
BRIAN: Canvass ads
CHRIS: Canvass ads, creating audiences out of people who’ve watched certain depth of video, meaning if they watched 95% of it, you can put them in a different group and market to that group and show them a call to action ad. So that’s an example of a couple things we are going deep on right now.
But to get into the meat of it, why don’t you introduce people to how we start building this lists.
BRIAN: So we built the list of basically 28 points and these are things that we found ourselves doing anytime we started working with potential clients. We never formalized them or put them into a list, but they are all the things we look at when we put together statements to work for potential clients.
So we are going to go through that list, but we do want to make a really important point. The companies that we are going to be talking about in the video series, we actually do not work with these companies, we’re actually just picking them out of the sky for a lot of different reasons that we’ll find interesting. And hopefully interesting to the viewer.
But we don’t actually know them, so it’s important to know that while we’re looking at a lot of different signals, it doesn’t really necessarily reveal the entire strategy, someone might not have Facebook pix on their page, and to Chris and I it might seem like a red flag or very strange but for them it might have a point.
CHRIS: There could be a very specific reason why a specific piece is missing from our list, and we might start to wonder why it’s missing or speculate, but we don’t really know.
BRIAN: And it could be hidden from us.
CHRIS: So there’s going to be a limit to maybe how deep we can understand everything, but the point is that it’s very practice driven, there’s a lot of theory and discussion in our industry and this is about something a practitioner would do and something that you can glean a lot from.
It’s kind of hard to reverse engineer strategy, that’s kind of the nature of strategy, that the tactics aren’t going to tell the whole story, it’s kind of the tactics together and the reasons why and the goals after the fact and there might be some reasons why a company is not, running PPC ads right now and they used to.
It’s not going to be easy for us to know that without talking to them or understanding the reasons why. So maybe a byproduct of this podcast and the show we’re going to do will be to start to draw threads of what is strategy, what are the different things you need to consider when making a strategy. Just by our struggle to reverse engineer by looking at tactics.
BRIAN: Braking into those tactics a little bit, we put them in two different buckets. One is basically conversion, and one is getting more traffic to your site. So with that we’re going to dive into the conversion part of our tactic points. And I’m going to kind of introduce each piece of our bullet checklist and Chris is going to dive into why it’s so important.
So starting out with one of the things we deal with a lot at matchnode, the Facebook pixel.
CHRIS: Right, so the Facebook pixel, Facebook recently released a new version of the pixel, say in the last six months where they replaced the legacy one, and now you put this new pixel and not just on conversion pages, but on every single page of the site, and it marks certain pages as conversion pages, like a thank you page for instance. You can go into Facebook and you can mark that.
So the first thing we’ll look for we can see this with the Facebook pixel finder, as well as by looking at the source code, is even if you’re not running Facebook ads, you should probably have this on there.
BRIAN: Right, and that’s mainly because the Facebook audience insights tool is so powerful.
CHRIS: And if you’re not running ads now, but you want to in the future, all this data is going to be retroactive as long as the pixel is on there. So, say you have some really popular blog post, and you’re not running ads, but you’ll be able to in the future decide, oh you know what, we’ve got a follow up to that blog post, let’s go back.
BRIAN: Let’s go target users from 180 days ago.
CHRIS: Who saw the first version or whatever and you can show it to them, you can show an ad, push that updated post to them, just because they saw that previous page.
BRIAN: So that’s usually the first thing we’ll add to a company we’re working with them, immediately get pixels on their websites. The next piece that’s a little bit deeper within Facebook would be, Facebook standard events.
CHRIS: Yeah, so this would show a deeper level of ad sophistication, it would show that potentially a company is bidding on conversions Brian, why don’t you explain a little more about the standard event.
BRIAN: Well the standard events are really used for one, bidding on conversions, two, Facebook analytics for measurement which is really important that Facebook measures things a little bit differently than your google analytics and even the standard events are going to be fired so you can look at your data a little bit differently so you understand maybe someone came through Facebook initially, and then converted on your website 5 days later. And your analytics are going to show that as maybe PPC or organic or referral, when really your Facebook ad initiated the top of the funnel caused that person to come down. And you can usually see those events either in the events or in the Facebook pixel helper.
CHRIS: Right and so that would be another signal to us that these people know what they’re doing on Facebook ads deep enough that they’re tracking out comps very likely continuing within conversion and these are all kind of tracking points. You brought this up, google analytics, of course we want to look and see that on sites, almost everybody has it. It’s been a couple years almost but google migrated over from classic analytics to universal analytics. Now most people should be over to universal analytics, if you’re not, it’s one thing to do right now.
BRIAN: One thing we do often see is some people have universal analytics on their page, but they don’t necessarily remove the old analytics. And we’ve seen that mess with companies’ bounce rates and do some different things with conversion tracking as well.
CHRIS: For sure, very often, we’ll see people with multiple analytic tags out there, and that will throw errors and cause problems when you get into the nuance of trying to understand what’s happening.
BRIAN: Right, and going right along with it is google tag manger.
CHRIS: So google tag manager gives marketers a place in the code within which all of the marketing tags will go. Google tag manager is on its site and then we do start working with that company, we’ll ask for access to that because we’ll want to dig into what they have on their site as far as tracking tags go. And see if there’s anywhere we can help, or deepen, or add anything to it.
BRIAN: Right and the next thing is kind of an offshoot of google analytics, would be people analytics, something like mixpanel or kissmetrics. And we did a whole podcast on the importance of people analytics. But let’s touch on that briefly and how it’s different than the analytics people are used to.
CHRIS: So google analytics are session based. If Brian visits your site today on his laptop and then he visits on his mobile phone later on tonight and then tomorrow morning he checks it on the tablet, google analytics would count three sessions from three different browsers. Essentially google analytics is tracking browsers.
People analytics with these more advanced tools would have a much better chance of noticing and knowing that Brian is the same person across all those three devices, and that of course becomes really valuable when say you have an ecommerce business, trying to decide together attribution around the sources of all your traffic. And how you’re getting sales, and also of course re-ordering. You want to see that this same person that once bought on their mobile device, today bought on their desktop is the same person. It really makes a big difference for you to be able to understand why people are rebuying and who they are vs just having a tradition GA.
And interestingly if you’re advanced and have google tag manager, some of these other things are going to be hidden because they’re going to be in the tag manager container.
BRIAN: And then moving kind of in a different segment is more usability and the first thing about usability that we really care about right now is mobile.
CHRIS: For sure, still within the conversion world. We will on our team we’ve got a lot of android but certainly some IOS as well. So we’ll have someone with an android device, someone with an IOS iPhone, take a look at this site that we’re digging into super quickly just to see is their mobile responsiveness sound. Is it work, especially if it’s ecommerce, we’ll go through and add something to the shopping cart, see what that experience is like.
Very often there are quick wins to be found just through mobile optimization.
BRIAN: A lot of times people still rely on a little bit of an outdated mobile strategy and they say they have an app to take care of their mobile users. And that’s really not good enough since the majority of the top of the funnel traffic is going to come to your mobile website, not necessarily download that app.
The barrier to entry of downloading an app is pretty high at this point.
CHRIS: Very high, very few people will want to download an app for a single purchase on an ecommerce site. For example, they’re just going to want a nice easy conversion experience. Within the mobile web. So mobile responsiveness is important to have whether or not you have a native app.
BRIAN: Sure, and that leads directly into the next piece. And that’s site speed. And desktop site speed is important. But just as important that or probably more important than that is your mobile site speed.
CHRIS: Right, so connections on mobile tend to be less reliable, if you’re walking down the street or on a bus or something, you might be going in and out of a place that has good 4g or 3g. People have very little patience on a mobile device for a page that is kind of hanging up. It’s just one of the most important things there is in conversion optimization. I’d say it’s probably a little underrated. People who really know what they’re doing will look at site speed right away. Like you gave some blog post out there, if you gave conversion rate optimization experts 4 hours on a site, what would they do? And some of them would say they’d spend two hours just making the site faster.
We’ve seen it work again and again, it helps with SEO, google sees it as SEO signal, it’ll help with your PPC because people won’t bounce as much, it will just make your conversion rate go up. We’ve all had the experience getting annoyed because the site is slow and you just leave. That creates a bad experience, and a bad vibe all around. So site speed is a huge one, and one that is easy win, right away, get the site speed faster and then move on to kind of more visual things in the check-out experience.
BRIAN: Sure and this stat might be a bit dated, but 40% of abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Personally I think it’s probably higher than that.
CHRIS: Yeah, for sure. We once had a client where we found their site speed was really bad and it was an ecommerce company. We were trying to optimize and improve their conversion rate. And we were excited to find, oh obviously let’s just fix this and this will improve the conversion rate say even, 10-20% makes a big difference on the top line and the bottom line. And we were surprised, and this was the first time this happened. And he said, no I don’t think that will make a difference. And we were like what? It’s got to make a difference, please do it. and it did.
BRIAN: Still staying within the conversion world, but moving into landing pages, one of the things we spend a lot of time building for our clients and again we’ve done a whole other podcast on Unbounce pages and why we like it.
CHRIS: Yeah so, this would probably be one of the depth areas of our T-shape as a firm for sure. We’ve spent tons and tons of time on landing pages. Unbounce, our friends and partners of ours, and we really enjoy this part of the work and it really helps conversion a lot when you have a specific landing page for each ad. A lot of times there’s different concepts that might be tied to the different audiences that may be interested in a product. And so we will create different landing pages for those different concepts. Making sure that the audience to the text that’s in the ad to the landing page all kind of align and will line up for what is going to happen after the landing page. Whether we’re sending them to the products page, or whatever the goal of the campaign might be.
BRIAN: The first step is making sure that each ad has a specific landing page and that’s more of a specific check point. But the next piece is more of a grade. And that’s called the attention ratio.
CHRIS: Yah and this is something I don’t know if Ollie came up with it, but it’s something I’ve heard Ollie talk about or heard him talk about it a lot at different events, including on our podcast, I don’t know if he brought it up when he was a guest.
But attention ratio is the ratio of things someone can do on your landing page vs the number of things you want them to do on your landing page. The number of things you want them to do should always be one. It should be click this single thing, fill out this form and click submit. Click the button to go to the product page. So you want a ratio of one to one.
Sometimes that’s a bit hard, but there’s things like, putting your social logos all over your landing page, maybe near your checkout button. So say you’ve got Facebook, twitter, and Instagram buttons that take you to those various social profiles and now the only thing you want them to do on the landing page is to do the thing the landing page is designed for. But now they’ve clicked on your Instagram page, and you may think that’s great because you’ve got a great Instagram following, but now they’re not going to go back.
BRIAN: Overall chance of conversion is going to go down.
CHRIS: It’s going to go down because they went somewhere else. So if you’ve got those three logos, and some people will leave their header or footer because they want it to look like their website, so now you have 17 places where someone can click and really only one place you want them to click, so that’s something to clean up.
BRIAN: The next four pieces are really mechanics of a landing page. And that’s the forms that you’re using, the call to action, the heading, and the hero shot. And those all really work together, and they also really do fall within the attention ratio.
CHRIS: Right, so these things can be on landing pages. We can be looking at specifically someone’s landing page or else we might just be looking deeper into their website, their checkout funnel, and say well this form is really great, or not. Or these call to actions make tons of sense or not.
BRIAN: how long is this form, is it easy to use on mobile?
CHRIS: The hero shot is a good one, there’s a tool out there that Angie Schottmuller developed and we’ve seen her talk a couple times as well, and we’ll link to it in the show notes, but it gives you a very specific step by step, this is what it should be in the image that is drawing attention and really deepening the emotion and making people understand what it is that you do.
For certain business or certain products or services, this really zeroing in on getting the exact right hero shot, and she gives you a way of measuring that and of grading it. So we’ll add that as well, and that’s another thing we’ll look into on the show.
BRIAN: And the last piece of conversion is a simple little trick within Facebook, and that’s adjusting the call to action button at the top of your Facebook page.
CHRIS: Right, so it’s another one of those underrated things that Facebook rolled out where one day, or week, or month, they decided they should have a different customizable call to action button at the top of every business page.
BRIAN: Yeah, maybe like isn’t the best idea.
CHRIS: Yeah, so you can basically customize what the button says. It can say learn more, it can say, buy now, it can say call now. And then you can link, or create the appropriate next step based on what that call to action is.
So we’ve had a couple of clients who say, we’re spending a lot of money on Facebook ads, and we’re not really building up the Facebook page as much, we’re trying to take them to the site, or take them to a landing page. And then we’ll look, and say it’s working so we’ll start spending a fair amount of money and driving a lot of traffic and then all of a sudden we’ll look at the analytics and you’ll want to put the property UTM on the call to action button on Facebook and we’ll see all this traffic coming from there, and that’s converting.
BRIAN: And that happens mainly because someone sees a Facebook ad and rather than going right to that Facebook ad, they end up clicking on the page to find out a little bit more about the company. That’s not the majority of your traffic but that’s a decent amount of your traffic so you want to give them a call to action.
So now we’re going to move into the second piece which is traffic generation. And we’re going to start with search. So one of the first thing we do is we use a tool called Spy-Fu to investigate the overall search, paid and organic, what’s happening with the company here.
CHRIS: So this is another one that will visually make sense when we put in the show notes of screenshots of what this might look like. People might be familiar with it if you work in this world. But essentially you can take your competitors websites, your own website, Spy-Fu will be pretty good at picking out three or four of your competitors if you have a real estate firm, it will pull some of the big real estate sites.
BRIAN: And it’s going to show the terms that you’re converting on or they’re converting on, or that you’re drawing a lot of traffic on the organic side or on the paid side.
CHRIS: Right, on the paid side, it will estimate what the spend is, what your competitors are spending. It can show you their ads. It can show you, it gets really deep, it can show you keywords that you’re bidding on, that they’re also bidding on. It can show you a Venn diagram of words that you’re both bidding on and then on the outside of the diagram are words that you’re bidding on and they’re not and vice versa.
So it can really especially when you have an industry where there’s 4 or 5 competitors that are doing a lot in this world, you can really quickly get an idea of what are the really top volume or top performing keywords because everyone is bidding on them. And of course they’re going to be too competitive or extra competitive. So you’ll have to remember that those might be more expensive but it’s probably because they’re working. They show you ads, they show you the top performing ads. So there’s really a lot and you’re both on the paid and organic side. And a cousin or spy for organic, I’d say another thing for SEO another thing we do right away is we look at Moz or other tools out there to see what they might have going on from an SEO standpoint.
BRIAN: And then we just dive into the actual search engines and type in different phrases and start to see what comes up. And one of the first things we look at when looking at a google ad that pops up is are they using site-extensions and phone extensions on mobile. They can make a huge difference.
CHRIS: For sure, there’s things from location extensions to phone call extensions, like you mentioned.
BRIAN: there’s a lot of new formats coming out from google, we’re going to be taking a look to see if they’re using those.
CHRIS: So through the process of this show we’ll try not to click on too many of your ads unnecessarily, but it may happen, and if we do it to you, feel free to let us know and we’ll send you $5-10 in the mail.
BRIAN: And then we also dive into Bing. And that makes some people scratch their heads. But Bing is kind of sneaky in its market share out there at times.
CHRIS: Yeah, I think a lot of people, particularly smart people who are savvy on the internet and spend a lot of time you know in this world, might be underrating what Bing can do. It’s one of those things we just think you should test.
Because first we will build up an AdWords campaign first assuming we’re building a PPC campaign from scratch we’ll start with google. Once you get a base lay of the land and you’ve made some rough refinements. Bing is like, they know what their status is in the market and has made a tool so you can essentially download your entire AdWords campaign, upload it right into Bing. IF nothing else, you may have a campaign and you just want more volume because it’s working, go to Bing. Bing is going to be, I don’t know what do you think it is?
BRIAN: Sometimes it’s 30%
CHRIS: The other thing is that Bing is going to be a little bit cheaper.
BRIAN: Competition is going to be a little bit less.
CHRIS: Cost per click is going to be a little bit cheaper. Depending on your business it may not convert as well, or it may convert better. I think the very rough and maybe not entirely accurate stereotype would be that people on Bing tend older, they may be less savvy.
BRIAN: They’re using Cortana on their phone or even on their desktop. They really like voice search.
The next two are brand name search, organic and paid. Obviously every company wants to come up number 1 when they google themselves, that’s pretty much 101. A lot of times that doesn’t happen, companies end up actually paying. But sometimes companies end up doing both, just to push their competitors that much lower. So we want to see how important that brand name is to their company, to make sure their name is always number one is search.
CHRIS: For sure, and another signal. It’s also interesting sometimes when you just choose the number of a company or have a name of a company. You know Matchnode is not a common word and if you googled us right when we started there were very few results. There are other companies that are named more of a common word. And so if your company name is microphone, there’s going to be a lot of things you’re going to have to compete against.
BRIAN: Like amazon selling microphones.
CHRIS: Yeah, when you search microphones, you’ll get amazon results for how to buy microphones. So it’s going to be really hard for you to push that, and so that could be a reason to use paid search for your brand name, but organically you’re going to have a tough time.
BRIAN: The next piece of ads we look at are targeting ads. Those are really across the web, then also within different aps like Facebook and twitter.
CHRIS: Yeah and this can be maybe a harder one to find publicly if you’re doing the sort of audit or analysis that we’re talking about doing repeatedly here. You just have to click all over their website and give it a couple days and see if the ads are following you around.
BRIAN: We also like to do that for their competitors too.
CHRIS: Yeah, for sure, and then take screenshots of them and be sure that they do have retargeting set up at least as far as you can tell. They may be not targeting you even if you’re being retargeted, then they say we want people who saw this page and this page, or this page and they’re a female over 50 or something. Again this is not perfect, but it’s a rough guide to find if someone is using retarget.
BRIAN: The next one is something we use a lot, we feel pretty strongly about, we touched on it at the beginning of this podcasts, the power of video.
CHRIS: At a minimum, most businesses, not all, but most should have a video, or some video. And again it depends on the business, but we had a prospect recently that we just started searching around YouTube, we looked at Facebook, we’re looking on their website, seeing what videos they had. We could see they had a lot of really great videos and were able to figure out who made them, and we knew that firm. And we thought, man they spent some really nice money to make some great videos here, but they had 200 views and 250 views and you could just tell that they were underutilized. So certainly something that we suggested to them and it would be again another signal. We’re looking for these little nuggets where we can find a hole that we can maybe offer quick wins or good advice, or things to get started with to get started working with them.
Either creating a new video for them, or reworking some of the existing video footage they have into a more suitable edit for Facebook or Instagram or whatever they want to use. And again it’s just another signal. I think having a video anywhere on your website has been shown just to increase your conversion rate.
BRIAN: If nothing else, testimonial videos are so easy to shoot and can be so powerful.
The next too we’re going to take a look at is Buzzsumo.
CHRIS: Alright so buzzsumo there’s a lot you can do, but one of the first things we like to do is, you just put the domain in of the company we’re thinking about or looking at. And it will give you even for free, ranks by number of share on each platform, the most popular posts they’ve ever had.
So like on twitter, their most shared post, the most shared piece of content they’ve ever had on twitter, they had over 250 retweets and this is the url, they do the same thing with Facebook and the other platforms out there. Again, it gives you a really quick snapshot, is this a company that has content that’s being shared widely or not?
And maybe super applicable and they have a hole there, or they’re doing a great job and we know that and they’re content marketing oriented will help us talk to them. Or they haven’t really had much organic social sharing period. So it gives us another really interesting signal.
BRIAN: So the next signal or point on the checklist, definitely isn’t right for a lot of companies, but is a home run for another good segment of companies, is affiliate marketing and do they have that affiliate program in place?
CHRIS: Yeah, and again on the subject that all of this is public and marketing is about being found publicly and reaching more people, you can really just search for the URL or domain of the company we are talking about and then affiliate or affiliate marketing or affiliate program and then find out if they’re willing to pay 7% for sales and if they’re on affiliate marketing platforms, and if they are and if they have an affiliate page on their site, it’s an interesting signal.
We’re looking for a mix here of signals that would give us some sort of a strong signal, like oh that’s one we should follow. So there are some ecommerce companies that say they have a video that’s great, and is very widely shared and their Facebook page is super active and you can see that, and they’re spending a lot of money on search, and organically they’re doing well, they have a strong business, we can kind of see that from all these signals, but they don’t have an affiliate marketing program.
I’d say, that would be interesting, you know at this point you seem to have your checkout flow in pretty decent working order, you’ve got a lot of volume, there could be some sales here that are left on the table that you could get just by not even paying for the traffic, just by paying a percentage of the sale.
So that’s one that’s always easy to find publicly.
BRIAN: The next one is a simple social property check, does your Facebook page look good, is it active? Is your twitter feed look good? Are you guys on Instagram? Increasingly more and more, are you using Instagram stories? Are you on snapchat?
Looking at all these properties as a whole, we like to really kind of think about them as a whole, and which would make the most sense for the business, but also think of it as an overall grade of how they’re using social.
CHRIS: Yeah for sure, not every company should have all the channels, but you’ll be able again depending on the business to tell that they are committed to posting regularly, and they have a good. I don’t think it’s even posting regularly, but it’s responding to people. IF you’re searching on twitter for them, and somebody is reaching out and asking questions, would be clients or customers, basically customer support questions and they’re not being responded to, that would be a sign that.
BRIAN: Look at their @replies, make sure they are positive.
Wrapping up our checklist is good old fashioned email, the original internet marketing tactic.
CHRIS: Yes, and still powerful. Certainly last, but not least, very far from least. You could argue that it could be at the very top of the list. But most people have an email program and have a place on their website where you can give them your email address because you want them to stay in touch with you. And so we will fill that out of course and see if we get an immediate auto responder. See if they start to put us in a sequence of emails that we’ll get over some days, and kind of how those look. If they’re optimized and if they make sense. And we have thoughts that we’ve developed through experience of what’s the best way that different companies should use email. Whether it’s a super visual brand where you do want pictures, or a company that shouldn’t waste their prospects time by trying to get them to read a super long email and maybe a short link to the content.
Again, customized to the business that we’re talking about, but email is a huge one and one that is really easy to see what they’re doing.
BRIAN: That wraps up our 28-point checklist and we took a look at different conversion pieces and different traffic pieces that make up that list. And like we mentioned at the middle, where these really start to intersect is the overall digital strategy. And we start to think about what pieces are in place, what pieces aren’t and how the strategy might need to shift to optimize that business for growth on the web.
CHRIS: Gives us a sense of what they’re trying and what they’re not trying and it can prepare us for a deeper conversation with them about why and why not. Strategy like we said, it’s imperfect, you can’t reverse engineer a strategy just based on these tactics, but you can certainly get a really good sense. So I think that’s going to be a thread that hopefully we’ll weave through all these shows we do.
And maybe as we go we’ll get better at it. Like here’s the you know, we have 28 points, and maybe it’ll turn into 35 or maybe we’ll drop it to 25 as we go. It’s going to be a fluid list. But I think by the end we’ll want to be able to synthesize, and say here’s the three to five most important things we can see here. And therefore we have a hunch that their strategy is moving in this direction or is in this ballpark.
BRIAN: Alright, well that wraps up this podcast, that wraps up this Facebook live. Any final words that you want to say?
CHRIS: No thank you, thanks for listening everybody.
BRIAN: Ok, well we’re super excited to get going with all this and we hope you’ll be watching our videos as they go live. Thanks guys.
CHRIS: Thanks Guys.
Resources:
–Rand Fishkin’s Blog: T-shaped Marketer
–intro and outro music from our friends at Sabers: https://sabersmusic.bandcamp.com/releases